Sunday, October 27, 2013

On 17-18
October 2013, I attended the conference on the 19th-century German
philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer organized by the philosophy department of Ghent
University. Keeping in mind the interests of my audience as well as my own time
constraints, I will limit this report to just one session: the one relating
Schopenhauer to Asian philosophies and to the comparative science of religion.
Note that I haven’t read any Schopenhauer since the 1980s.

Love deceives us

Jonathan
Head, from Keele University, UK, spoke on “Schopenhauer, Love and the Upanishads”. He
restated that Arthur Schopenhauer wrote some anti-Christian polemics as well as
high praise of the Upanishads. (That much, at least, the old philosopher had in
common with yours truly.) His aim was, to explore the influence of Schopenhauer’s
reading of the Upanishads with a view to locating the precise differences between
agapè (charity, more or less prema) and eros (desire, more or less kāma)
in Schopenhauer’s system.

The speaker
relied on the “self-expansion model of love”. He found this back is a famous
passage of the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad:
“It is not for the love of the wife that the wife is dear, but for love of the
Self.” The goal of the ordinary self is to become the Self. The Self seeks
become everything, and this begins by the attempt to subsume other people. This
begins as self-centred (desire), but can become altruistic later (charity).
Thus, love becomes a phase in the expansion of the self. Intimacy is a love-relationship
of reciprocity in which each person feels validated. Love is motivational.

Schopenhauer,
sceptical of self-deceptions, said that romantic love deceives us: “The sex
drive deceives us into feeling admiration”; indeed, is a notorious phrase, he
opines that only under the influence of his sex hormones, men can describe the
“low-height, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped and short-legged” women as “the
fair sex”. Admiring the other’s qualities, the self believes it achieves its
own self-expansion, but it is really being deceived by species, which urges men
and women on to have such feelings as motivating them to procreate. (Earlier
that morning, Schopenhauer had been described as a predecessor of Richard
Dawkins, who analyzes altruistic behaviour as serving “the selfish gene”.) Love
is the misfiring of the Will’s drive to self-knowledge, an attempt to achieve
wholeness.

Fellow-feeling

Christopher
Ryan, from the Metropolitan University in London, spoke about “Moral Universalism
and Discrimination: Schopenhauerian agapè
and Confucian ren”. He is the author
of a book on Schopenhauer called “The Death of God and Oriental Religions”.

In Confucianism,
we love our family more than others, and that is deemed right. Students are horrified
about this. However, the Chinese only go a bit farther in this than most of us.
It is easy to see how one would love his father more than someone else’s father;
but here the son’s loyalty also means that, against a universal morality, he
would truthfully reveal the sins of another, but conceal the sins of his father.
Schopenhauer’s agapè is more
universalistic than that. Against Immanuel Kant, though, it is a universalism
of proportion.

Theories
full of abstraction are just empty, according to Schopenhauer; and this
includes Kant’s theory of universalist morality. Kant says that actions only
take place if there is a sufficient motive, that this is a necessary law for
all rational beings. Schopenhauer calls this lacking in any substance unless
these motives are located in reality, viz. empirically traced to their biological
sources. The species wants to procreate and therefore instils in the
individuals something they take to be love.

Schopenhauer
sees one criterium for selfless love: fellow-feeling when a sentient being is suffering.
But this empathy will empirically be found to be stronger for someone closer of
kin, or at least for those with whom we have had tangible relations, though it
is conceived as kind of universal. Again anticipating the “selfish gene”, he
sees self-sacrifice as ultimately selfish, or at least species-selfish.

Similarly,
the Confucians made a moral discrimination opposing contiguous and far: we feel
stronger for those closer to us than for those more removed. Kongzi’s follower Mengzi
showed first of all that human beings are endowed with a natural fellow-feeling
(ren). In his example, we feel
motivated to intervene because of sympathy or compassion when we see a child on
the verge of falling, and we feel this compassion without calculation. However,
these higher, universally intended concepts have a lesser content, because
empirically, we feel them less when a being farther removed from us is
involved. So, Kongzi (Confucius) is clear that we can love another’s father but
never as much as our own. So, this gradedness in compassion is common to both
Schopenhauer and Confucianism.

Ryan was
aware that the debate between Schopenhauer and the Kantians had also taken
place in China itself, more than two thousand years earlier. Kongzi’s notion of
graded sympathy was challenged by a philosopher called Mozi, who taught
universal love (jain’ai). The
arguments to and fro were very similar, and historically, the Confucian
gradualist position had won.

Pessimism

Dennis Vanden
Auweele, from my alma mater, the Catholic University of Leuven, spoke about “Religious
Love and Resignation”. He proposed to elucidate the notion “a pessimistic
religion”,, and in particular Schopenhauer’s dictum that “the purpose of a
religious doctrine is, to give a mythological cloak for truths inaccessible to
the untutored mind”.

In
Schopenhauer’s view (as well as that of many Enlightened intellectuals), philosophy
is properly true, but fit only for the few; religion, by contrast, is only allegorically
true, but is appropriate for the masses.

Vanden
Auwele gave a survey of Schopenhauer’s assessment of the different religions. The
philosopher was raised in Christian circles, and though he criticized Christian
belief, he kept on evaluating it fairly approvingly. He especially approved of
what he called “authentic Christianity”, by which he mean the New Testament,
the doctrine of original sin (“the only thing that can reconcile me with the
Old Testament”), Saint Augustine and mystics such as Eckhardt. Many people
contrast really existing Christianity with some chosen part of Christian
doctrine as the “real Christianity”. In the contemporary world, he knew
Christianity in its Catholic and Protestant varieties. He considered Catholicism,
like the ancient heresy of Pelagianism (which rejects eternal sin) as too optimistic,
hence living in illusion, and essentially Pagan; Protestantism as degenerate
and too rationalistic. In most respects, Judaism, Islam and “Paganism”
(including pre-Vedic but excluding post-Vedic Hinduism) were too optimistic or
world-affirming for his taste. By contrast, Buddhism and Upanishadic Brahmanism
were in agreement with “authentic Christianity” that this world is a vale of
tears from which men needs redemption.

Schopenhauer
believed in a radical separation of goodness from nature. From Protestantism,
he inherited the notion (also existing in devotional Hinduism, unknown to him)
that what you do does not affect your
status; only faith in God does. By contrast, Pelagianism and partly Catholicism
is condemned for optimistically believing that your own works can “force” God
to interfere on your behalf. Compassion and asceticism: these virtues lead to
self-renunciation via the metaphysical acknowledgment of a mystical unity of
reality. In “true” Christianity, all are children of the same father; in
Brahmanism, all are of the same essence, one in Brahma. These two are
characterized by love: Brahmanism by love of the real, authentic Christianity
by God’s agapeic transcendent unconditional love. Judaism and Islam lack this
love. Protestantism precludes the awareness of ultimate oneness by eschewing
mysticism, while Pelagianism reduces the mysteries to banal intelligence. But
above all, Schopenhauer found his pessimistic worldview in (or based it on)
Buddhism.

He
emphasized the allegorical nature of religion: it is not strictly true, but
allegorically. When confronted with a mystery, we should not destroy it by projecting
exegetic notions into it, for then only banality remains. Finally, faith is
like love: it cannot be forced. It comes to you, you can’t go to it.

Afterthought

The
remarkable thing about Arthur Schopenhauer is that he built such a large part
of his philosophy on the Upanishads and Buddhism when these were as yet so
little-known (around 1820). Only towards the end of his life did he master
Sanskrit, so he had to make do with just a few translations. For the
Upanishads, he used Anquetil Duperron’s French translation from a Persian
translation of the original Sanskrit. Yet, his understanding of them was better
than that of many later thinkers. (In the same period, Georg Hegel wrote a
undoubtedly biased but fairly insightful commentary on the Bhagavad-Gita.) In
this regard, Schopenhauer was the opposite of his admirer Friedrich Nietzsche,
who in ca. 1880, in the heyday of German Orientalism, could have used many more
translations and personally knew the famous Indologist Paul Deussen, yet relied
on amateurs like Paul Jacolliot for the few references he made to Indian
thought and society.

Schopenhauer
fully acknowledged his Asian sources and never tried to hide these or to claim
their ideas as his own. In that respect, he doesn’t seem to fit Rajiv
Malhotra’s scheme of the “U-turn”. In this scheme, Westerners first learn from
Indian masters, then progressively adopt the learned ideas as their own, and
ultimately go and advertise them back in India as the latest intellectual
contribution from the West. While Schopenhauer in person didn’t follow this
pattern, his followers later kind of completed it. Nietzsche mentioned
Schopenhauer a number of times, and the connection which contemporary scholars
have made with Asian thought is largely due to Schopenhauer’s influence, but he
is already very sparing in referring to Schopenhauer’s Asian sources. Most
philosophers at the conference had studied him but not the Indian roots of his
thought.

Saturday, October 26, 2013

In a past article, we had argued that the Buddha lived and died as a Hindu and
that Bauddha Dharma is nothing but one of the sects within Hinduism.
Ambedkarite neo-Buddhists and Ambedkar-touting secularists are understandably
furious when their ambitions for a separate identity or their schemes for
pitting Hindus against Hindus are thwarted. So we received a number of
questions meant as rhetorical and as exposing the hollowness of our claim. Six
are from a certain S. Narayanaswamy Iyer, then three more by a Dr. Ranjeet
Singh. We reproduce them and then answer them. First Mr. Iyer’s questions:

(1)Which of our four Vedams did Buddha
follow in his teachings?

Throughout his text, Mr. Iyer presupposes one of the
most common weapons which the enemies of Hinduism use: changing the definition
of “Hinduism” to and fro, depending on their own best interest. Thus, the
Christian mission lobby swears that “tribals are not Hindus”, except when tribals
defend themselves against encroachment by Bengali Muslim settlers or take
revenge on the Christians for having murdered Swami Lakshmananda and four of
his assistants; then they are suddenly transformed into “Hindus”. Here, as long
as convenient, “Hindu” is narrowed down to “Brahmanical”. The Vedic tradition,
started among the Paurava tribe established in Haryana, was the most
prestigious tradition, first to take the shape of a fixed corpus and learned by
heart by a class of people set apart just for this purpose. Tribe after tribe
adopted this tradition, all while maintaining its own identity and religious
practices. Kings in Bengal and South India imported the Vedic tradition and
gave land to settle Brahmin communities just to embellish their dynasties with
this prestigious Vedic tradition. But other traditions existed alongside the
Vedas, both among speakers of Indo-Aryan and among Dravidians and others. Many
non-Vedic elements come to light in a corpus collected in the first millennium
CE, the Puranas. Many more were incorporated by the later Bhakti (devotion)
poets or have subsisted till today as part of oral culture. All these Pagan
practices together, Vedic and non-Vedic, constitute “Hinduism”.

When the Muslim invaders brought the Persian
geographical term “Hindu” into India a thousand years ago, they meant by it: an
Indian Pagan. In Islamic theology, Christians and Jews count as a special
category, and Parsis were often considered as Persian and not Indian Pagans.
But all the other Indians were called “Hindus”. Whether tribals, Buddhists
(“clean-shaven Brahmins”), atheists, polytheists, Brahmins, non-Brahmins, the
Lingayats, even the not-yet-existing Sikhs or Arya Samajis or
Ramakrishnaites,-- all of them were Hindus. It is now a mark of anti-Hindu polemicists
that they manipulate the meaning of “Hinduism”, and interpret it more broadly
or more narrowly as per their convenience. The first rule of logic is “a = a”,
i.e. “a term retains the same meaning throughout the whole reasoning process”.
So, against these manipulations, we will stick to one meaning for Hinduism,
viz. the historically justified meaning of “all Indian Pagans”

The Buddha had, according to Buddhist scripture,
received a Kshatriya upbringing. That means his outlook was formed by an at
least passive initiation into the Vedas. Never in his long life did he
repudiate this. On the contrary, he only developed ideas that were already
present in the Vedic tradition. Thus, “liberation” was a goal that the
Upanishadic thinkers had invented and that set them apart from practically all
others religions (certainly from Christianity and Islam). Meditation or yoga as
the technique to achieve this liberation was first mentioned in the Upanishads.
Buddhist scripture mentions two meditation teachers with whom the Buddha
studied. At most he invented a new meditation technique, Vipassana (now
vulgarized as “Mindfulness”), but meditation was an existing tradition into
which he was initiated by older masters, and to which he contributed his own
addition, like others did. Reincarnation and karma are at the heart of
Buddhism, and is the first thing which outsiders associate with Buddhism; but these
concepts were introduced in the Upanishads. Even the repudiation of what the
Vedas had become, particularly the repudiation of ritualism, is already found
in the Upanishads. And so is the rejection of desire, the extolling of the
value of compassion (daya), and the first options for celibate monkhood. When
Buddha became a recluse, he followed a path that was already well established,
and that is already mentioned in the Rg-Veda, though only in the third person
(the Vedic poets themselves were elite figures and a different class from the
renunciates). The Buddha rightly said that he had not invented anything new,
that he was only treading an ancient path formerly trodden by the earlier
Buddhas.

Hindu attitudes to the Vedas varied greatly. Some had
never heard of them, some had heard the names but knew little of their
contents, some thought they were interesting literature but not a guiding light
for moral decisions or choosing a way of life, some adopted practices which
they called Vedic though they were not, some paid lip-service to the Vedas, and
some really practised Vedic rituals or learned the Vedas by heart. Within this
continuum, the Buddha took his place, without this ever being a problem for the
Brahmins. The only two attempts on his life were committed by a jealous pupil
of his own, a leading Buddhist. Still, he died at an advanced age.

(2) Which of our 330 devathaas did
Buddha worship?

The more usual number is 33, but modern tourists (and
therefore also the secularists) have opted for 330 million. This number is
based on a mistranslation of “33 big gods” as “33crore (= ten million) gods”. Anyway, the
number can vary, but yes, there are quite a few, let us settle for “a lot”.
Like many elite characters and thinkers, the Buddha is reputed to be into other
things than worship, as were many people in Vedic society. Sankhya was an
atheist school, as was early Vaisheshika, and so were Jainism and the Charvaka
school. The Mimansa school, orthodox par excellence, taught that Vedic rituals
are effective alright, but the gods invoked during the ritual proceedings are
mere cog-wheels in the magical mechanism set in motion by the priests. These
gods have no reality in themselves and only exist in so far as they are
invested with existence by the human beings who “feed” them. So, atheism was a
recognized option among the Hindu elite, of which prince Siddhartha Gautama,
the Buddha, was a prominent member.

All the same, he paid homage to the gods on some
occasions. His breakthrough to liberation was followed by an intervention of
the supreme gods Brahma and Indra, asking him to share his bliss and teach his
way to liberation with others – the very start of Buddhism. Had the Buddha or
even the later editors of the Pali Canon been as anti-Vedic as the present
neo-Buddhists imagine, they could easily have censored this episode out. At the
end of his life, during which he was regularly consulted on political matters
because he was after all very at home in statecraft, he was asked by the
authorities of a republic to formulate the qualities by which a state prevents
decline. In reply, he listed the “seven principles of non-decline”, and among
them is an abiding maintenance of ancient religious traditions, including
rituals and pilgrimages. The ancient religious practices which he knew, were
Vedic or at any rate Hindu ones. Buddhist monks later carried Vedic gods such
as Indra, Brahma, Ganapati and Saraswati to foreign lands. Japanese temples are
dedicated to Benzai-ten or Saraswati, some house the “twelve Adityas/Ten”. The
Shingon sect of Buddhism has a quasi-Vedic ritual called “feeding the gods”,
exactly the same conception as in the Vedas. Thai and Indonesian Buddhists have
adopted the cult of Rama, whom the Buddha did not really worship but whom he
venerated as a great scion of the Aikshvaku lineage to which he himself
belonged, and of whom he claimed to be a reincarnation. Neo-Buddhists object to
the long-established Puranic teaching that both Rama and the Buddha are incarnations
of Vishnu, but the germ of this teaching was planted by the Buddha himself when
he claimed that Rama and he were the same person.

(3) Which of our samskaarams did Buddha
tell his followers to observe and perform?

Samskaarams (life rituals) are meant for people living
in society, as the Vedic poets did. Renunciates are living outside society,
often they perform their own funeral upon “leaving the world”, and after that
the samskaarams no longer apply to them. The Buddha founded a monastic order,
an organized form of renunciation. He did not found a separate non-Hindu
religion (the way the first Christians did), for his lay followers were part of
Hindu society. Mostly we are informed of their caste provenance, their families,
their marriage situations. Whatever customs or rituals applied in their
respective Hindu communities applied to them as well. Jains developed a
separate lay community, but even these lay Jains are part of Hindu society.
They observe caste, often intermarrying with non-Jains belonging to the same
caste but not with Jains belonging to another caste. In Buddhism, even this
much separateness did not exist. Buddhism was nothing but a monastic community
within Hindu society. So the Buddhist order did not observe Hindu lay society’s
life ritual, just as many non-Buddhist renunciates didn’t.

(4) Which of our varnaashrama rules,
duties and practices did Buddha teach his followers, and which of those do they
perform today?

Caste is a part of lay society, not applicable to
renunciates. Their names revealing their caste provenance are replaced by
monastic names. The questioner also betrays his short-sighted assumptions by
projecting the caste relations of recent Hindu society on that of the Buddha’s
time. Social order was in flux at the time, with the Buddha e.g. defending
caste as defined by the paternal line regardless of the mother’s caste against
king Prasenadi disowning his wife and son when he finds out his wife (and therefore,
he assumes, his son) isn’t a true Kshatriya. Clearly, both conceptions of
caste, viz. in the paternal line vs. full endogamy, were competing at the time,
with the Buddha taking the then more conservative position, while later the
principle of full caste endogamy (only marriage within one’s own caste) was to
prevail. Mind you, the Buddha didn’t use this excellent opportunity of a king’s
question on caste matters to fulminate against caste. If he was an anti-caste
revolutionary, as Dr. B.R. Ambedkar imagined, he would have seized this
opportunity to condemn caste itself, but he didn’t.

Caste was in existence but considerably more relaxed
than in later centuries. For this reason, the Buddha’s attitude was more
relaxed too, unlike the obsession with caste among the neo-Buddhists. Moreover,
he had chosen not to rock the boat in a society that tolerated and maintained
his monastic order. In every country where Buddhism found a place, it accepted
whatever social arrangement prevailed. In Thailand, it didn’t abolish
hereditary monarchy though this is a casteist phenomenon par excellence. In
China it didn’t abolish the centralized-bureaucratic empire. On the contrary,
when the Buddhist White Lotus sect drove out the Mongol dynasty, its leader,
who had started out as a Buddhist monk and was deemed the Maitreya Buddha,
established a new imperial dynasty, the Ming, replacing the Mongol ruling class
by a Chinese ruling class but leaving the exploitative system in place. In
Japan, it didn’t abolish militaristic feudalism; instead, its Zen school became
the favourite religion of the Samurai warrior class. So, in India too, it fully
accepted the arrangement in place, recruited mainly among the upper castes
(most Buddhist philosophers were born Brahmins), and concentrated on its
spiritual mission. Buddhism as an anti-caste movement is just a figment of the
secularist imagination.

(5) Which Hindu priests initiated Buddha
into sannyaasam?

Any lineage is founded by someone who takes the jump. Later on, it is continued
by followers who go through an initiation ceremony; and when succeeding their
guru, they go through an investiture ceremony. But the founder just has his
moment of enlightenment. Asking about the founder’s initiation is the mediocre
mind’s imposing his humdrum norms onto a genius. Thus, Ramana Maharshi was
unprepared when suddenly, the insight overcame him; he didn’t receive it from a
teacher. Even so, when Siddhartha Gautama went to the forest, he did become a
pupil of at least two meditation masters. Probably they put him through some
kind of initiation, though we don’t have the details on it.

The questioner means “Vedic” whenever he says “Hindu”,
and projects everything we now know as Hindu (decried by the Arya Samaj as
“Puranic”) onto the Vedic age. The institutionalization of Sannyaasa
(renunciation) took on a shape recognizable till today with Shankara in ca. 800
CE. In the Vedic age itself, the current formalities of Sannyaasa did not
exist. When Yajnavalkya retired to the forest (the occasion on which he
pronounced his famous exposition of the Self to his wife Maitreyi), he did not
have to take anyone’s permission. Valmiki of Ramayana fame set up his own
hermitage, as did seer Vasishtha and his wife Arundhati. So he starts imposing
current Hindu norms on the Buddha twenty-five centuries ago. This just
illustrates the over-all unhistorical character of the neo-Buddhist rhetoric.

(6) When and where did
the initiation take place?

As a youngster, the Buddha must have gone through the
thread ceremony making him a full Kshatriya. This was unlike most modern
Kshatriyas, who leave it only to the Brahmins to don the thread. Then, he went
through the marriage ritual, at least according to the Pali Canon. Some
scholars doubt that he had a wife and son and think that later scholars have
merely turned a particular nun and a particular monk into his mother and son.
Be that as it may, Buddhist scripture makes no effort at all to deny that he
had gone through whichever appropriate Hindu rituals were part of the life of
anyone belonging to his class and age group.

Later, when he became a renunciate, we are vaguely
told that first he searched alone, then he had some companions (though we don’t
have all the details about their relations), then he had two successive
teachers. To be a renunciate at that time, he did not have to go through
specific rituals, but he may have. Then, after he reached his awakening, he
became the topmost man in his universe and didn’t recognize any living human
being above him and empowered to put him through further ceremonies. His pupils
became monks through a ceremony (dharmam
saranam gacchami, “I take refuge in the dharma”), just as every other Hindu
sect has its own procedure for allowing new members in. The relation of his
pupils to him was the same as that of other renunciates to their guru. The
institution of guru-dom was, again, exported by Buddhism as far as Japan.

Then we consider Dr. Singh’s additional questions:

1)Which were the rules, duties and
practices he himself followed at that particular time, had followed and used to
follow before in the youth and pre-Buddhahood mendicant life?

As the Pali Canon
explains, he was the son of the President-for-life of the Shakya tribe, a
Kshatriya by birth and upbringing. After he became a renunciate, he practiced
asceticism and several meditation techniques of which names are given, though
we cannot be sure which techniques are meant by these names. At any rate, they
are the same names and probably refer to the same techniques which are
incorporated in the Buddhist training scheme before the meditation technique
that brought the Buddha his awakening.

2)Was his marriage with Yashodhara, his
first cousin, in accord with the Vedic rules: as per Shaastra injunctions?

Writing only came to
India after Alexander, i.e. well after the Buddha. Though the Shaastras contain
older material, they were at any rate written centuries later than the Buddha. In
the age of the Vedic seers, they were totally non-existent. So, unless Dr.
Singh insists that the Vedic seers were un-Hindu, it is not a defining trait of
a “Hindu” to follow the Shaastras. Like most anti-Hindu polemicists (and, alas,
quite a few pro ones too), he displays a most unhistorical conception of what
“Hinduism” means, projecting recent notions onto ancient history.

What this question
alludes to, is the difference in marriage customs between the Shakya tribe and
the Brahmanical injunctions. The Brahmins practise, and their Shaastras
prescribe, rules of “forbidden degrees of consanguinity”. By contrast, certain
other peoples, such as the ancient Dravidians or the contemporaneous Muslims,
practice cousin marriage. In this case, we find that the Shakya tribe practiced
cousin marriage. The Buddha’s father and mother had been cousins, and his own
reported union was also between cousins. The Shakyas were apparently aware that
within the ambient society, they stood out with this custom, for they justified
it with the story that they had very pure blood, being descendants of patriarch
Manu Vaivasvata’s repudiated elder children, who had arrived at sage Kapila’s
hermitage in the forest and built a town there, Kapilavastu (where the Buddha
grew up). So, to keep Manu’s blood pure, the Shakyas had to marry someone with
the same blood.

Some scholars say this
is just a story made up to convince their neighbours. The true account,
according to them, is that the Shakyas were originally an Iranian tribe that
had moved along with the great migration eastwards, from the Saraswati plain
into the Ganga plain. The prevalence of cousin marriages was one of the main
differences between Iranians and Indians. That contemporaries describe the
Buddha as tall and light-skinned seems to conform to the Iranian identity.
Nowadays also, after twelve centuries in India, Parsis are still physically
distinct. Well, be that as it may, the custom of cousin marriage was at any
rate in existence among the Shakyas, whatever its provenance.

What we have here, is
a typical case of Brahmanical norms being overruled by caste autonomy, another
defining feature of Hindu society. For comparison, consider two rather dramatic
examples. Widow self-immolation (sati) is forbidden in Brahmanical writings
since the Rg-Veda, where a woman lying down on her husband’s funeral pyre is
told to rise, to leave this man behind and re-join the living; yet the custom
flourished among the Kshatriyas, particularly the Rajputs. Brahmins could lay
down norms all they wanted, and ambitious lower castes might well imitate these
Brahmin norms; but if a caste decided to defy these norms, there was little
that could be done about it. For another example: abortion is scripturally
condemned as one of the worst sins. Yet, some castes, such as notoriously the
Jats, could kill their unwanted children before or even after birth. If today’s
India has a problem with the balance between the sexes because so many girl
children are being aborted, this is very much against the Shaastras (though
secular feminists addressing ignorant Western audiences will still blame “Hinduism”).
But caste autonomy means that the caste Panchayat (council) and not the
Shaastric law is the ultimate arbiter. So, if the Shakyas insisted on
maintaining their own non-Brahmanical marriage customs, Hindu society allowed
them to do so.

3)How; on what authority and provision of
the scriptures, Hindu Shaastras, had he entered the fourth aashrama and entered
sanyaasam, a born prince as he was? Was it dharma for him, a born prince? Was
it in accord with and as per the teachings and provisions of the scriptures and
enjoined for princes, members of the Kshatriya varna? Is it and has it been so
prescribed and postulated? If yes; could we know how and where? On what
scriptural grounds: what pramaanas, words and provision of the scriptures?

Here again, we have a lot of projection of later Hindu scripture onto Hindu
society during the Buddha’s life. First off, the notion of a “fourth aashrama”
is – and here I break ranks with most Hindus and most Indologists – a confused
compromise notion. The Vedic system very sensibly distinguished three stages of
life: before, during and after setting up one’s own family, i.e.
Brahmacharya/student, Grhastha/householder and Vanaprastha/forest-dweller. The
first stage is devoted to learning, the second to founding and administering
your family (until your daughters are married off and you first grandson born),
the third is devoted to renunciation. This renunciation could take different
forms and have differently conceived goals, but at least since Yajnavalkya, it
was understood as looking for the Self, working on your liberation. This is not
split into two, Sannyaasa is not more renounced than the Vanaprastha stage. It
is only when ascetic sects introduced renunciation not as a sequel but as an
alternative to family life, that Brahmins fulfilled their typical function of
integrating new things by extending the aashrama scheme to include Sannyaasa.
So, what Buddha entered was not a “fourth stage” (he was still in the second
stage and had never even entered the third stage), but an alternative to the
second stage (family life), viz. renunciation as a full-time identity and
lifelong profession. Just as Shankara was to do, and as Hindu monks mostly
still do. Being pluralistic, Hindu society recognizes different forms of
renunciation, both after family life and instead of family life..

As a Kshatriya, it was
not considered the Buddha’s dharma to renounce the world. His father hoped his
son would succeed him to the throne and made every effort to keep him from
renouncing the world (including his caste vocation). Similarly, Shankara’s
mother tried to dissuade and prevent her son from becoming an early renunciate,
as he was her only hope of her having grandchildren. Hindu society recognizes
the option of monkhood as an alternative to family life, but this doesn’t mean
that individual Hindu lives and schemes cannot be adversely affected by this
option. Both Siddhartha and Shankara disappointed their families and renounced
their caste dharma to become monks.

Conclusion

Neither of the
questioners has been able to pinpoint a moment in the Buddha’s life or
preaching when he made a break with Hinduism. He inherited most of his ideas
from the ambient Hindu tradition, and stands out mostly by the institution he
founded, the Buddhist monastic order. His meditation technique may be his own,
though with a canon written two centuries after his death and by scribes who
were less than impartisan, we don’t really know what happened. His intellectual
system mostly systematized ideas which were in the air and had already found
mention in the Upanishads. Among his monks, Brahmin philosophers gradually
refined and perfected his philosophy, ascribing most of their new ideas to the
master himself.

When Dr. B.R. Ambedkar
“converted” to Buddhism in 1956, he made his co-“converting” followers promise
that they would renounce Hinduism and specific Hindu practices. It was the
first time in the history of Buddhism that this happened. The Buddha had never
renounced, or made his novices renounce, any religion they formerly practiced –
in fact, the notion of “a religion” (as opposed to “religion”, a very
approximate translation of “dharma”) hardly even existed. Ambedkar’s involved
the typically Christian notion of conversion as “burning what you have
worshipped, worshipping what you have burned”. The box-type notion of religious
belonging, with rejecting one identity in order to be able to accept another,
is fundamentally un-Hindu. In other countries too, entering Buddhism did not
entail any formal renunciation of Daoism, Shinto or any other tradition. So,
when Ambedkar and his hundreds of thousands of followers (mostly caste-fellows
from his own ex-Untouchable Mahar caste) “converted” to Buddhism, most Hindus
saw this as just an entry into a particular Hindu sect. As V.D. Savarkar
commented, Ambedkar “conversion” was a sure jump into the Hindu fold.

Buddhism was classed
as a separate religion from Hinduism because travelers and then scholars had
first become aware of it outside India. When separated from its Hindu roots, it
did take on a life of its own. Yet in India, it was not more than one of the
many Hindu sects, although numerically the most successful one.

Finally, the Buddhist
separatist polemic is fundamentally unhistorical in projecting contemporary
Hindu traits onto ancient Hindu society. Unfortunately, this also counts for
much Hindu activist polemic. Shaastric norms are absolutized, when in fact they
were changing throughout history. And most importantly, devotional theistic
forms of Hinduism, now long predominant, are projected onto ancient Hinduism
which had several distinct conceptions of the divine, including atheism. It is
common for Hindus to lambast non-Hindus as “atheists”, as if there were no
atheist Hindus. The category “atheists” would naturally include Buddhists, who
can therefrom deduce a separate non-Hindu identity. This way, narrow-minded
Hindus themselves reinforce the unhistorical neo-Buddhist separatism.

Wednesday, October 23, 2013

On the Indo-Eurasian Research List, a certain Touraj Daryaee announced that he was going to write something about the Iranian Homeland Theory, an idea that has reportedly been launched in the 1990s. So, he informed about what must be, according to his information, a similar development in India. I sent him, through the list, the following reply on 21 October 2013. Two days later, moderator Steve Farmer let me know that this message could, alas, not be posted.

Dear Touraj,

The Indian homeland
theory dates back to the 18th century European Enlightenment (Kant, Voltaire)
and was espoused by the first generation of Indo-Europeanists in the very early
19th century (Schlegel). But by 1830 or so, Eastern or Central Europe (and
thus, as far as India was concerned, the "Aryan Invasion Theory") was
near-universally accepted as homeland.

Immediately it was
put to political use in Britain's colonial policies. It was a God-sent in
justifying Britain's occupation of India, as the British were deemed only to be
repeating what their Indo-Aryan cousins had done thousands of years ago. As the
die-hard colonialist Winston Churchill said more than a century later: "We
have as much right to be in India as anyone there, except maybe the Depressed
Classes who are the native stock." In India, the theory was immediately
seized upon by anti-Brahmin activist Jotirao Phule,
incidentally an alumnus of the missionary education system.

In 1916, the British
authorities, in a move against the Brahmin-led Freedom Movement, patronized the
founding of an anti-Brahmin and Dravidian-chauvinist party, the Justice Party.
After independence and till 1962, it espoused a Dravidian (in effect, only Tamil)
separatism, and more recently, it supported and aided the Tamil Tigers in
Sri Lanka. The AIT is the alpha and omega of its worldview.
Idem for the Dalit movement: while its founder BR
Ambedkar articulately opposed the AIT, his followers reduce every issue to
Aryan upper castes vs. native Dalits. Idem for the "Other Backwards
Castes" (Bahujan) or at least their Western-sponsored
spokesmen. British colonial administrators also coined the pseudo-Sanskrit
term Adivasi ("Aboriginal") for the tribals, projecting the American
racial situation, with European invaders subjecting the natives, onto India.
Till today, even scholars who ought to know better, innocently use the very
word Adivasi as proof of the tribals' native and the non-tribals'
invader origins. It was used on many fronts to pit variously defined
"natives" against variously defined "invaders".

All this while, Hindu
nationalists were also active, e.g. Hindu Mahasabha's founding 1922 and
Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh's founding 1925, without ever questioning the AIT
which was so massively used against them. The AIT was so unassailable, with all
the prestige of the "scientific" West, that nobody dared to question
it. It was e.g. roundly accepted in the 1923 book Hindutva by VD Savarkar, the
very manifesto of Hindu nationalism. Cultural spokesmen often quoted by Hindu
nationalists, such as AK Coomaraswamy and VS Agarwal, also presupposed it in
their work. As late as the 1960, RSS leader MS Golwalkar only dared to
posit an Indian homeland by crankily postulating that the poles and all other
places' coordinates had shifted and that this Indian homeland was the same
as the Wolga/steppe homeland that the scholars assumed.

So, Hindu
nationalism can perfectly coexist with a foreign homeland, and it did not
invent the Indian homeland theory (though the terminology you use implies
otherwise). Many national myths are not based on nativeness but on their
state's establishment by foreigners, e.g. the USA, of course, or Mexico, but
also Romania, Russia and others. What irked Hindu nationalists about the AIT,
however, was its political use to divide the Indian population, both before and
after independence. (See about this Rajiv Malhotra & Aravindan Neelakandan:
*Breaking India*.) Those academics who choose to oppose the Indian
homeland theory *because* of its alleged political use by the Hindu
nationalists (there are of course other reasons, too), should realize that in
that case, they should oppose the East-European homeland theory annex AIT
a hundred times more, for it has been politically misused for a far longer
time in far more countries (including Nazi Germany, which espoused and
used the AIT as a perfect illustration of its racialist worldview),
and from positions of power. The Indian homeland theory is the pastime of
a handful of writers, while the AIT is on the Indian government website and is
taught to hundreds of millions of pupils and students. We hardly have
a level playing field here.

This much for the
(necessary) background. Now to answer your question. In the 1980s (1982, from
memory), a remarkable book was published by KD Sethna, the erstwhile secretary
of Sri Aurobindo, and then already nearly 80 years old: Karpasa in Vedic India.
It argues that the AIT cannot be true, for the Rg-Vedic culture, indubitably
located in India, predates the Harappan civilization. Indeed, he argues,
cotton/Karpasa does not figure in the Rg-Veda but is quite present in the
Harappan cities. Other material items follow the same pattern, according to
Sethna. This drew a few other writers' attention to the subject, and they then
published their own (good or not-so-good) arguments for Vedic indigenousness,
as well as their account of the massive political use, both in the West and in
India, of the AIT. Around 1990, historiography was very much in focus,
though mostly of the medieval period (due to the Ayodhya temple/mosque
controversy), and in that climate, the Hindu nationalist movement seized
upon the Aryan non-invasion theory. But being intellectually very lazy, the
movement invested nothing whatsoever in further research into Aryan origins
but at once shouted victory: the AIT was declared dead.

Mind you: I have not
used the now-common term Out-of-India Theory. To describe the Hindu position,
this term is too flattering. It was coined ca. 1996 probably by Edwin Bryant,
and assumes Indo-European linguistic unity from Iceland to Lanka, with
India as the source of expansion. But in fact, Hindus don't look beyond the
Khyber Pass: they are satisfied that e.g. no archaeological proof has ever
been found for Aryans moving into India, so they conclude that no
Aryan invasion has taken place, but they don't assume the burden
of responsability to explain how, in that case, the Europeans have come to
speak cognate languages. They don't go looking for traces of India-based
tribes moving out of India and making their way to Central Asia and then
to Europe. Quite a few of them put in doubt this linguistic
unity, disparaging comparative-historical linguistics to be a "pseudo-science",
and most don't even think of the non-Indian dimension of the homeland question. The
Aryan non-Invasion Theory has millions of followers, the articulate
Out-of-India Theory only a handful.

Always welcome if you
have any further questions.

Kind regards,

Koenraad ElstPostscript (23 October 2013): Now I remember another factor for the fairly sudden rise in Aryan Non-Invasion thinking ca. 1990: a few anti-Invasion publications by Western archaeologists such as Jim Shaffer. These emboldened a mass of Indian archaeologists to vent loudly what they had been noticing for some time: that in spite of being the official and well-funded doctrine for a century and a half, the AIT had still not yielded a single trace of the Aryans moving into India. BB Lal, routinely slandered on this list and elsewhere as a mere "Hindu nationalist", made his name as a promising top archaeologist by identifying the "Painted Grey Ware" culture with the Aryans moving deeper into India in the 50s and 60s; but he changed his mind and saw that he had merely *assumed*, not proven, the AIT. He is but one of many scholars who "converted" away from the AIT. Among Indian archaeologists, the Aryan Non-Invasion Theory is by no means a fringe opinion.

Tuesday, October 15, 2013

On the
occasion of Navarātrī, Dirk Gysels,
historian and civil servant of the Belgian kingdom, spoke, at the request of
his daughter Freya who runs a centre of devotional and ritualistic yoga to the north
of Antwerp, about the “Cosmology of the Divine Mother”.I present the majorlines of the discourse of Dirk, who himself
practises Śākta spirituality.

In contrast with our own Christian upbringing
which taught us a very small world, Tantra
knows an infinite number of universes, themselves already as large as the
modern physicists’ universe. All these together are the Mother, all universes
are part of it, butthe Mother is not
just the physical dimension, She encompasses deeper, more subtle levels of
reality as well.Navarātrī is the time to contemplate this.

We have a
heart but also a mind. Let us, after all the heartfelt bhajans and abhiśekams,
approach this question with our mind. We have recited the Durgāsaptaśati, the “Sevenhundred Verses of Durgā”. Those verses not only contemplate the presence of the
Mother in phenomena which we, from our dualistic mindset, see as ‘good’, but
also in less wholesome phenomena like forgetfulness, thirst, sloth, etc.In Christianity, divinity is always
associated with goodness; it doesn’t know what to do with evil. But the Divine
Mother is everything. She is śānta, maṅgala, and raudra, i.e. “peaceful”, “auspicious” and “furious, stormy”. The raudra aspects are worshipped too. So
there is no dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘evil’. There is no separation between
‘me’ and the rest of reality, and more importantly, there is no rift between
the Divine and the world. We don’t usually call it “unity” in Tantra, but non-duality, no-two-ness. So
for whom do we do pūjā? For something
outside or inside yourself? Everything is the Mother, so the Mother worships
the Mother. By playing this game, we reach unity.

“Divine
Mother” as a choice of words that wells up from the heart: Devī, Ambā. The
realization of Devī is rather called Śakti, but ultimately the two are
exchangeable.

We know the
gross level, but there are subtler levels. The Mother is on all levels. We can
start our description from the top and give a top-down explanation or we can
begin at the most obvious level of Her reality and present a bottom-up
explanation. See it as a ladder, a stairway with different sports.Now, we start at the summit, on the highest
level. From this vantage point, we will survey the 36 tattvas. Tattva is
“thatness”: a definition to order everything.

As we know,
light is both conceivable as particles and as waves. The particle side is tattva, substance; the wave part is best
conceivable in the words of Śaṅkara: ānanda laharī, saundarya laharī, “wave of joy, wave of beauty”.

Now let’s
look at tattva from the angle of the Śakti philosophy. Most of these texts,
mostly from Kaśmīr, have not yet been
translated, and much has been lost, but now texts are dug up and translations
are seeing the light of day. Once this was the preserve of a spiritual elite,
now is the age of democratization of information.

Most Hindu
philosophies see consciousness as the origin of everything. In the West, René
Descartes said: “I think, therefore I am”, but even there, being isn’t equal to
thinking. And in today’s views, matter is the basis of everything, while
consciousness is but an epiphenomenon. But here, the origin is consciousness.

Every tattva has spanda, vibration, pulsation, as explained in the book Spanda Kārikā. We live in a sea of
vibrations, and the interference between these vibrations is sometimes
harmonic, sometimes dissonant.

When
talking of manifestation, let’s be clear: we mean emanation, not creation. In
the Devī tradition, consciousness
emanates by concealing itself. Mercifully this kind of “veiling”, tirodaṇā, takes place, otherwise there
would simply be too many possibilities. (And as some astrophysicists speculate:
there may be an infinite number of realities, universes in dimensions unknown
to us.)

In the
oldest philosophy of India, Sāṁkhya
(“enumeration”), there are 24 +1 tattva’s;
here, this number is expanded to 36. Sāṁkhya
is a dualistic worldview, and dualism is contrary to the experience of the
yogis, so 11 extra tattvas are added
to unite the two poles.

So,
starting above, these eleven are:

1.Static
consciousness, that in which everything rests, the “power of consciousness” (cit-śakti),= Śiva.

2.The
light’s mirror (prakāśa-vimarśa), has
the quality of ānanda because it
makes consciousness self-conscious, = Śakti.
This concept of vimarśa is the key to
understanding all manifestation. Static consciousness, when it becomes
self-aware, needs mirrors in which it can see itself. All the countless
phenomena , all the trillions of conscious entities, serve as mirrors for the
static consciousness, as modes of expressionof śakti.

3.Sadā-Śiva, the “eternal Śiva”, has
intentions, will, resolve (saṁkalpa),
the “power of intention” (iccha-śakti);
represented by Ardhanarīśvara, the
“Lord who is half woman”.

4.Īśvara, the “Lord”, is what religions call God;
consciousness feels part Śiva part Śakti. Some texts equate this level with
the primordial syllable Oṁ.

5.Śuddha-vidyā, pure wisdom, often the divine
word. All vibrations of all mantras, theessence of all mantras; if a yogi rises to this level, he is a mantreśvara. Hence in this tradition the
importance of mantras. This is the finest level of mantra, recitation is only
the gross form. The mantra is a hyperlink to the Goddess,=the “power of action” (kriya-śakti). All divinities are embeddedin this Śuddha-vidyā
as subtle sonic , yet unmanifest, conscious energies.

6.The
first manifestation is Māyā, “that
which measures”, and thus restricts, makes finite instead of infinite; also
known as Māyāśakti or Mahāmāyā. This is not to be interpreted
in its Advaitā Vedānta sense of “(the
world as) illusion”. The five highest Śaktis
come together in the karaṇabiṇḍu, the
“causal point”, like an open hand of which the fingers contract. Yoga amounts
to reopening the hand.

7.The
next five are the kañcukas,
“armours”, starting with kalā,
restrained “autonomy”, limited “agency”, as contrasted with omnipotence.

8.Vidyā, restrained “knowledge”, as contrasted with
omniscience.

9.Rāgā, restricted “desire”, as contrasted with
fullness. Desire is not something to shun: it is the contracted expression of iccha-śakti. One can desire out of lack
of something and this leads to bondage or one can desire to express his or her
own fullness. So one should not kill desire but transmute it .

10.Kāla, finite “time”, moment after moment, as
contrasted with eternity, the timeless simultaneity of absolute Consciousness.

11.Niyati, which can mean determinedness, destiny,
causality, “finitude”, as contrasted with omnipresence. Niyati being causality is the force that binds the beings to their
karmas.

After these
eleven, we get the 1 + 24 tattva-s of
Sāṁkhya: 1 is the Puruṣa, the “person” or unit of
consciousness, the individualized Śiva.
The other 24 are Prakṛti, “nature”,
the physical version of Śakti. This
includes not just matter but also all phenomena that we would call “mental”,
i.e. consciousness of anything, consciousness wrapped up in any process, as
opposed to pure consciousness resting in itself. Number 1 of these 24 is pradhāṇ, the “first” or principle, 2 is buddhi, the “understanding” meaning the
power of discrimination; 3 is ahaṁkara,
the “I-maker” or ego; 4 is manas, the
“mind”. The rest consists of the five sensory organs (jñānendriyas), five action organs (karmendriyas: elimination, sex, locomotion, handling, speech), five
fields of each of the senses, and the five elements. The highest and lowest tattva are strongly united: Śiva and Prthivī, the element earth.

In Prakṛti, everything is characterized by
the 3 guṇas or “qualities”: the dark
and heavy (tamas), the turbid and
energetic (rajas), and the
transparent and weightless (sattva).

Everything
is a play of these tattvas. All these
tattvas are Ganeṣa/Ganapati, “Lord of
categories”, the offspring of Śiva
and Śakti. Their other child is Kārttikeya (“Son of the Pleiades”) or Ṣanmukha (“six-faced”), or with his
Tamil name: Murugaṇ. So Murugaṇ represents the going from gross
to subtle, the reascension to his parents Śakti
and Śiva. The “six faces” are the 6 cakras, the spear with which he is
depicted is the Kuṇḍalinī. Unlike Advaitā Vedānta, wrongly identified with
“Indian thought”, this system doesn’t see theworld as just an “illusion”. The world is an emanation of Śiva, the variety of trillions of souls
is but the manner in which Śiva meets
himself.

The whole
system is the Mother. You could call Her the zero-tattva. She is called Mātā
Tripurasundarī (“beautiful one of the three cities”) or Lalitā (“playful, spontaneous”). The
pouring-sacrifice (abhiśekam) that we
do for Her, also has a subtler level. It is ritualistic too, but interiorized:
the manas-pūjā or “mental ritual”.
But that is another story.

So much for
Dirk’s explanation in Heide (Kalmthout) on the last day of Navarātrī.

About Me

Koenraad Elst (°Leuven 1959) distinguished himself early on as eager to learn and to dissent. After a few hippie years he studied at the KU Leuven, obtaining MA degrees in Sinology, Indology and Philosophy. After a research stay at Benares Hindu University he did original fieldwork for a doctorate on Hindu nationalism, which he obtained magna cum laude in 1998.
As an independent researcher he earned laurels and ostracism with his findings on hot items like Islam, multiculturalism and the secular state, the roots of Indo-European, the Ayodhya temple/mosque dispute and Mahatma Gandhi's legacy. He also published on the interface of religion and politics, correlative cosmologies, the dark side of Buddhism, the reinvention of Hinduism, technical points of Indian and Chinese philosophies, various language policy issues, Maoism, the renewed relevance of Confucius in conservatism, the increasing Asian stamp on integrating world civilization, direct democracy, the defence of threatened freedoms, and the Belgian question. Regarding religion, he combines human sympathy with substantive skepticism.